One contributing factor of burnout, I believe, is our armoured hearts. When we block the flow of love, it causes stress. Period.
Love is healing, but on the path to unconditional love, our cultural obsession with lust and being “in love” is one that can paradoxically cut us off from love. Are you cut off from love?
A WEATHER VANE POINTED RIGHT AT YOU
When you fall in love with someone, that person acts like a weathervane pointing right to the centre of your being, revealing the greatest most profound truth about you; that within you is a deep endless reservoir of love. The problem with this experience is that it can leave you believing that without that person, the love within you, the love that you feel, will disappear.
In the absence of a weathervane, is there no wind? No weather? The weathervane acts as a mere tool to guide us. When you find yourself no longer “in love” – because the love within has shifted in various directions – the love never disappears, it doesn’t lose strength, it remains unadulterated in its purest form within you, flowing much like wind. Love is ever present, and in perpetual motion.
When a relationship faces conflict, change, or ending, you may believe that this vibration of love has disappeared, leaving you grasping at possession… I need to have you because without you I will be without love. Embrace the truth that love, while it may shift like the wind, is unwavering in its rootedness within you. The love you felt when you were “in love” was never within that other person, it was always within you. Let go of the attempts to hold it there in some strange stillness, like an awkward fake smile in a still photograph. It’s an illusion to think that love can be held in stillness. You don’t want a photograph of love; you want the movement of love in its glorious natural flow.
LOVE ILLUSIONS
Let go of the illusion that the love you felt was ever them. Besides being false it places undue pressure on your loved one to hold still, while also facing the forward motion of life’s momentum in some phoney love photograph. Love isn’t an Instagram picture with filters and captions; let’s stop treating it like that.
We have both the capacity and the obligation to spread love wherever and whenever possible. When you fall “in love”, it says far more about you than it ever says about the other person; when you fall in love, you are falling more deeply into yourself, and not, as the fairy tales would suggest, into another person.
On your love journey, rather than focusing on helping others understand you, try with the same level of exertion to unveil yourself internally, this will bring you closer to yourself, the one person you are here to know. The prize along the way is a self-love that increases in altitude, relative to the height of your search.
Every relationship and every experience gifts you with a deeper understanding of yourself.
To love a person does not require their permission to love them, they don’t require your commitment, they don’t require you to assert conditions onto them that reflect social conditioning (e.g., I will love you only if, only when… etc.).
On the path to embodying true, meaningful, unconditional love, we must not intertwine this healing vibration with possessiveness, ownership and most certainly, not with conditions. Separate your values and needs within relationships, and the love you bring to those relationships. Love just IS, there are no rules. Relationships have rules, actions and behaviours have rules, but love is a rule-free zone.
Here is an example… if I decide to engage in a friendship with you, there will be rules. Rule number one: you must laugh at all my jokes (ha-ha), if you don’t, I can no longer be your friend, but I can and will still love you regardless of your complete lack of humour. I can still choose not to be your friend, based on my need to have my friends laugh with me (at me?). Actions and conditions, versus the unconditional vibration of love. When you place rules onto the flow of LOVE you begin to build armour.
CONDITIONAL VS. UNCONDITIONAL
Conditions and boundaries within relationships are good, healthy, and necessary; just make sure that within your heart and mind you are separating the boundaries of a relationship and the boundaries of love. Once you start to play with the boundaries of love, you are building armour around your heart centre, from an energy perspective this can lead to you receiving less love, giving less love, and experiencing the love within you with less potency. An armoured heart will feel unnourished, leading to a fruitless search for external love.
APPOSING AGENDAS OF THE HEART AND MIND
What is the difference between boundaries in relationships versus boundaries of the heart?
When I love someone, they can say or do something that hurts me, they can act in a way that doesn’t feel loving to me, they can be unappreciative or disrespectful (particularly in a parenting situation), and in that moment, my mind will use emotions like anger or frustration to urge my heart to retreat in its flow of love. This lack of flow hurts me more than it does them, and it puts a strain on the relationship. To cultivate unconditional love in this moment, I can feel my heart responding but encourage my heart centre to remain open and flowing with love, while still responding by establishing a healthy boundary.
Sometimes the situation can be reversed, and my heart will beam with love and try to discourage my mind from establishing a healthy boundary (just as unhealthy as the reversed). That could look like this, “It’s ok that you are acting hurtful, I love you so much and you are so adorable, so it doesn’t matter”.
It’s as if the mind and the heart are two separate political parties in office at the same time! (imagine that?) Two different ideas on how to run things, two separate agendas. They are impacting one another, both thinking their way is the best way.
There is a way to live harmoniously with an open heart-centre, allowing love to flow in and around you while still establishing healthy boundaries within a relationship. Boundaries belong in relationships; boundaries are healthy and well. Just make sure that the love within you in casting out into the world without boundary – I promise it can’t hurt you.